This is the story of the Highland Scots who sailed to Pictou, Nova Scotia, in 1773 aboard the brig Hector . These intrepid emigrants came for many reasons: the famine of the previous spring, pressures of population growth, intolerable rent increases, trouble with the law, the hunger of landless men to own land of their own. Upon arrival at Pictou, after an appalling storm-tossed crossing, they found they had been deceived. The promised prime farming land turned out to be virgin forest. Only...
Winner of the 1991 QSPELL Prize for Non-fiction One of Canada’s founding peoples, the Irish arrived in the Newfoundland fishing stations as early as the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century they were establishing farms and settlements from Nova Scotia to the Great Lakes. Then, in the 1840s, came the failures of Ireland’s potato crop, which people in the west of Ireland had depended on for survival. «And that,» wrote a Sligo countryman, «was the beginning of the great trouble and...
The 19th century spawned a unique breed of men who took pride in their woodsmen skills and rough codes of conduct. They called themselves lumberers, shantymen, timber beasts, les bucherron – and, more recently, lumberjacks, working in the vast forests of eastern Canada and British Columbia. Across the country, farm boys would go to the woods, lumbering being the only winter work available. Immigrants – Swedes and Finns more often than not – resumed the trades they had learned so well in the...
